The moment Kael touched the sigil, the Nexus screamed.
His mind fractured—snapped backward into a vision.
He stood in a white lab. Earth's sky overhead, fractured and polluted. Scientists scrambled around a chamber.
Inside the chamber: Kael. Younger. Wired into a machine. Monitored.
"Subject KX-000 ready for divergence protocol."
Then it happened.
A betrayal.
One of the scientists—his mother?
She initiated a purge.
"He can't exist," she said. "The system won't survive him."
And Kael… was deleted.
He didn't die. He was erased from reality—from memory, from data, from Earth itself.
Kael gasped and stumbled back into his body.
Echo caught him. "What did you see?"
"My beginning," Kael said. "And my end."
He turned to the pod again.
"This world wasn't made for me. It was made to contain me."